We’ve noticed a few common misconceptions going around about phpBB3 or our service, and I thought I would take a few minutes to clear them up. I now present to you: FreeForums.org myths debunked!

MYTH 1: “You get what you pay for” and since freeforums.org is free it must suck.
FreeForums.org has a more secure and robust network than many paid hosts. It’s free because we choose to make money off advertising instead of charging the hundreds of dollars a year we could otherwise charge for our service. We have a large team focused exclusively on keeping your forum online and just have to need it, but if you’re still having doubts just ask our users!

MYTH 2: “The 99.9% uptime you promise is not accurate”
The 99.9% uptime we advertise refers to the uptime across our entire network, which includes webservers, database servers, backup servers, and more — as a whole. If a single server is temporarily offline, the rest of the FreeForums.org network remains online and unaffected, thus contributing to our overall uptime. Occasionally, there will be some slowness on a server if there is an abuser; however, we quickly find them and disable that forum.

MYTH 3: “Because we’re a hosted solution we doesn’t provide as much freedom”
The FF (Free Forum) System actually provides more freedom than a traditional phpBB. Our users often find it hard to go back to a traditional phpBB install because they lose all the features we have.

MYTH 4: “Moving from phpBB2 to phpBB3 was a mistake, I liked v2 better”
Like anything new, it takes awhile before you’re as good with phpBB3 as you were with phpBB2. Having said that, almost all users have grown to love phpBB3 and could never go back. If that weren’t a good enough reason for phpBB3 to be on top, phpBB2 suffers from security issues that won’t be fixed since it’s no longer supported. The bottom line is phpBB2 is like Windows 98 — while it was good at the time we have since moved on to better.

MYTH5: “FreeForums.org is basic and doesn’t have any “Advanced” features”
FreeForums.org offers more features than any other host on the market. We constantly hear how much people love all the features and mods we provide them. In addition, we also offer the most upgrades out of any forum host. With our paid upgrades you can add tons of features and mods to your already advanced forum.

I hope this cleared up some confusions among new members. If you have any questions please let us know!